The right wing just twists and shouts

Last Thursday morning came the news that GDP in June grew by 0.4%.

- Will Hutton

It was a “positive surprise” decreed NIESR, the economic thinktank that, with its warning of an impending £50bn fiscal gap, is hardly a government patsy. Construction and services did much better than expected, so instead of the derisory 0.1% growth that economists had expected for the second quarter, the outturn was 0.3%. Even better, on an annualised basis, a resilient, broad-based British economy was growing at 2.2%, the highest in the G7. Not yet the basket case that the right insists.

Yet the feed on my mobile from the Times at 7.37am informed me that the GDP data was a “fresh blow to Reeves”, while the BBC declared that growth had slowed between April and June. As the day wore on, calmer instincts emerged at both organisations, so by the evening both were acknowledging that the economy was faring rather better. So no blow to Reeves, but rather for her detractors. Although in the battle for who first determines the narrative, the detractors had yet again won.